


it's in the script

by FLWhite, zetaophiuchi (ryuujitsu)



Series: 2 boys, 1 dog, 1 snake [1]
Category: SKAM (France), SKAM (TV) RPF
Genre: Blow Jobs, Come Sharing, FOR LO WHAT HAVE WE WROUGHT, Falafels, GOD HELP US, Hair-pulling, If you don't know what RPF is look it up, M/M, Name-Calling, Ouba is too young to know, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, RPF, Resolved Sexual Tension, The thirst is real, hydration is key, maxel, the things that snake has seen, we really did, we warned you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 10:47:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18207374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite/pseuds/FLWhite, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/pseuds/zetaophiuchi
Summary: “In case you didn’t fucking notice, I only kissyou!”His lips move, wordless, and then he forces it out, his voice jumping like a fourteen-year-old’s, “It’s in the script!”*But where does the script end and reality begin?





	it's in the script

**Author's Note:**

> **This story is purely for entertainment purposes. Please do NOT share with anyone outside the AO3 community.** But do let us know if you liked it. :) We liked making it. Behold the crystallization of our love! 💖
> 
> The boys are consummate pros; we are consummate fools.

“Cut.”

It's all right, Axel tells himself, inhaling deeply as they reset positions. It’s just fine.

What kind of red-blooded flower of young French manhood would he be if he could spend forty minutes rolling around in his briefs with—with— _that_ and not get a little excited?

Red blood or no, though, this is his Big Break and he's not about to fuck it up, or fuck up things with Maxence and make the rest of shooting, and the inevitable rounds of promo after, hideously awkward. Not to mention if they bump into each other on the stairs in their building. So he swallows and tries to think of deserts and cold water. For a minute it kind of works.

Then he makes his ultimate mistake. He looks up, cautiously; the coast is clear, clear, clear, until it's not. Maxence is fucking _biting his lip._ His _fucking lip_.

"Lucas..." he says. Axel shudders and with enormous effort drags his eyes away. Shit, yes, acting. Acting, yes, right, good.

 _Acting_ , he screams internally at his disobedient dick.

"More tongue," David says to them, with utmost seriousness. Maxence nods languidly. He quarter-turns and winks at Axel with one eye. And then, oh God, he sticks out his tongue, his dangerous tongue, just a teeny bit, soft and pink, at the kiss-damp corner of his mouth.

Axel's spine feels like it's housing a live current. "That—that wasn't enough—enough—" He can't even spit out the word. He stares unblinkingly at a knob on one of the booms. Even its ridges are looking obscene.

Not for the first time, he thinks furiously at Maxence’s perfect shoulder-blades and the immaculate lines of his rib cage as they taper into the waistband of his briefs, _How dare you be like this_? _Why did you even try out for this role_? _What did I do to you in our previous lives_? And, as discreetly as he can manage, he squeezes his thighs a little more tightly together.

He feels strongly that he deserves at least three Césars if he can avoid coming in his pants by the end of the day.

David, damn him, smiles beatifically.

“No, of course, this is the most intimate moment! You are joyous, you are elevated, you are _high_. _High_ on love.” Maxence giggles and puts a hand on Axel’s naked shoulder. All of Axel goes hot and cold at once.

 _Please, David, please_. Axel widens his eyes beseechingly. _Please, have you no soul, have you no compassion, have you no morals? Do you really want to see me come in my underwear, is that what you want?_

And is this what Maxence wants? He seems to be trying his hardest to make it happen. His hand slips across Axel’s shoulder and does a little tap dance up the back of Axel’s neck.

“Come on, Lucas,” Maxence says. Axel wonders if this is how a hapless prey animal feels as jaws close on its throat. His heart is thundering. He’s not a hedgehog; he’s a rabbit. Maxence looms over him, presses him gently back down onto the sheets.

Maxence’s eyes are intent. He scans Axel’s face, searching. And again, _fucking again_ , he bites his _goddamn_ lip.

“M—Eliott,” Axel says weakly. “Wait, I need a moment. I need, I need—water!”

“Okay, okay,” David says, waving a P.A. over. “Five minutes, then we’ll take it from the tongues.” He winks. “I mean, the top.”

Axel, bottle in hand, paces in the corner of the room: a rabbit in a trap. He can’t exactly run out into the street and all the way back home as he longs to do in his underwear. Not that that would be much of an escape, knowing that Maxence would be fifty meters away by the end of the day. He feels the bed, Maxence, everything, as a simmering heat at his back. He can hear the minute shifting and rustling and sliding of Maxence’s skin against the sheets as he stretches. He’s probably crossing his legs, staring at the ceiling, totally relaxed, the bastard. It’s too dangerous to look.

But oh, he wants to.

Maybe just a peek. One little tiny peek with the very corners of his eyes--

Maxence is worse than lounging like a perpetually high angel. _God damn, what is he_ doing? He’s also got a water bottle. He’s also sipping from his bottle. His fingers, his fucking incredible fingers, are wrapped almost delicately around the bottle, and Axel finally manages to jerk his eyes away, but it’s too late. He can’t unsee Maxence’s fingers absently stroking the plastic curves of that poor vessel, tracing its horizontal ridges, two smooth pink fingertips shining wetly.

Axel fixes his gaze on a minute crack in the corner of the set with fervor. A hasty glance down tells him that, though it feels like he’s full-on hard, it was absolutely the correct decision to wear his tightest briefs today.

He glances back at Maxence.

Maxence grins and raises both his brows, and then he tilts his head back and takes a swig. Axel watches his throat working, sees the light glistening across his knuckles, the slight arch of his back. There’s no way this isn’t intentional. No. Fucking. Way.

 _Two can play at this game_. Papa David is about to have his socks blown off. Ouba’s daddy does not fuck around. He hands his bottle back to the P.A., squares his shoulders, raises his chin.

Maxence’s eyes widen a little under those despicably beautiful lashes.

“All good, mon petit?” David says, with a bit of twinkle. “No longer parched?”

No, and it’s Maxence’s mouth that’s about to run dry. Axel nods at David and Maxence both, curtly.

“Okay, positions,” David says.

Axel climbs back into place above Maxence without hesitation, though the crotch of his briefs is still uncomfortably tight. He tries for steely eyes above a tight, hard smile; Maxence blinks, his mouth a little slack. He seems to be surprised when the P.A. darts toward him and pulls the bottle from his hand. Then he smiles back at Axel with supernova brightness and Axel immediately feels the steel that had so briefly toughened him softening. “Welcome back, Lucas.” Unbelievably, the smile grows even brighter. “Remember, more tongue.”

Axel grits his teeth. “Oh, I _remember_. Eliott.” On “action,” he shoves his right hand into Maxence’s ridiculous hair and flattens his left against that ridiculous chest and lays siege to that ridiculous mouth with tongue and teeth combined. Through the thrumming of his pulse, he forces himself to open his eyes, and feels a bolt of that hot-cold feeling shoot from the base of his neck all the way to the tip of his tailbone.

Maxence is kissing him right back, tit for tat, curling and flicking their tongues together, and his pupils are dark and huge and seem to say, _yes_. _Yes._

They revolve and slide together on the bed, cradling each other. The kisses stretch and stretch; like taffy, Axel thinks, sticky, impossibly sweet. His mouth feels like it’s melting. He startles back into himself when David’s voice rings loudly in his ears: “Cut, cut!” He opens his eyes to find Maxence, above him, looking drunk, pink staining his cheeks and ears. He suspects his own face is equally bad—worse, for sure, because he doesn’t have those glass-cutting cheekbones nor those eyes, rimmed with smoke.

“Good, that’s the spirit, mes petits.” David leads the crew in a smattering of applause.

~

It’s a disease, Axel thinks. It has to be.

How can Maxence look so good eating _falafels_? He’s eating them so messily too, head down, bringing the pita to his face, biting the fritters out from the bread that he’s folded like a trough. Anyone reasonable, looking on, would be horrified. Axel has always thought of himself as eminently reasonable.

But he is—of course—turned on. He’s imagining that face, those teeth, that flash of pink tongue quite elsewhere else.

Just as this horrifying thought slides across the membranes of Axel’s traitorous mind, Maxence looks up, wiping tzatziki from his chin.

“You’re not hungry?” he says.

Wordlessly, Axel slides his portion over. He _is_ hungry, just...not for falafel.

“Axel…” Maxence takes another enormous mouthful before completing his sentence. “Is everything okay with you, man?”

“Fuck, Maxence, come on,” Axel says. He’s not even annoyed anymore, just bewildered. “Does it not affect you?”

“The what?” Maxence grins, the vision of innocence, a daub of yogurt on his upper lip. Axel imagines how it would be to lick it away: cool cream against blood-warm skin. “Did you get your balls too spicy?”

He’s chosen the wrong moment to try to take a sip of water. “ _Putain_ ,” Axel says, dribbling a bit. “Maxence!”

“I get it,” Maxence says. “The tension, the tension. I know.” He’s still eating while he talks, dunking Axel’s abandoned falafels recklessly in the crumb-sullied tzatziki. “It’s pretty thick, hein?”

“ _Thick_ —” Axel grabs his glass and really chugs this time. He figures he’ll either choke to death right then and there—which solves many problems, such as his half hard-on. Or the icy water will have a soothing effect on said hard-on. Plus, hydration; hydration is good.

Or Maxence will lunge across the table and perform mouth-to-mouth. All scenarios are ideal, really.

Maxence sucks thoughtfully on a finger. “Does it bother you?”

“ _Does it bother_ —” Axel feels like a hot-air balloon, like the Hindenburg, inflating with mingled rage and arousal. When he bursts, lives will be lost. “Does it bother me! But no, Maxence, I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

Maxence smirks at him. “Really? Perhaps I have to lay it on thicker.”

“Then you _are_ doing this on purpose!”

“But of course,” Maxence says. “It’s our job. Isn’t it?” He smiles. “You really went H.A.M. earlier today, too.”

“David said to! We’re meant to grab our audiences, not—not each other.”

“We’re meant to grab each other as well,” Maxence says placidly. “It’s in the script.”

There’s no getting anywhere with Maxence here and that fucking tzatziki all over his fucking face. His fucking _perfect_ face.

His phone buzzes. It’s Marilyn. Thank _God_.

“‘Scuse me,” he mutters. He pushes back from their table with a long metallic squeak from the chair and hurries outside. He can feel Maxence’s eyes hot on his back, all the way to the door.

~

“Marilyn! Your timing is impeccable.”

“Oh, yes? Being chased by fans?”

Reflexively, he checks the street, but no one is looking at him, with his hood drawn up over his head and pulled down almost to his eyes. “No, worse: dinner with Maxence.”

“Dinner with Maxence! Dinner with an angel! Axel, hang up and go back to your table.”

Suddenly he wishes for the materialization of some shrieking fans, just to save him from this torment. But he can’t just hang up on _Marilyn_ , who is sweeter than éclairs and strawberry gelato and crème caramel put together. “Marilyn, I can’t bear it. I can’t do this.”

“Just tell him you like him, it’s not hard.” He revises his opinion: she’s not sweet; she’s a Boudica, a Cleopatra, a queen of steel.

“He thinks it’s all part of the job. Method acting. _Acting_ , Marilyn.”

“Yes, I know what it is that we do.”

She’s laughing at him. Axel thumps his fist against the brick wall of L’As du Fallafel, groaning.

“Come on, Axel. We’re adults. We have discussions. You’ve been as good as naked with this man, had your hands on his ass, your tongue in his mouth, and you can’t tell him what’s going on in your head?”

He can hear the sulkiness in his own voice. “It’s easier to kiss than to talk.”

“One can do both, I think,” Marilyn says. “Courage, Axel, grow a pair.”

He groans again. “Why did you call?”

“To invite you to supper with myself and Michel. But it seems you have other plans, so I’ll ask you another time.”

“Yes, come walk Ouba with me.”

“That will set the tongues wagging, I’m sure. Where has the angel brought you for supper? Le Cinq? Restaurant Kei?”

“ _Mais non_ , Marilyn, just the falafel joint, the one by the set.”

Marilyn snorts. “Pure romance.”

“You should see how he eats. I’m about to have my way with him on the table.”

Marilyn’s laughter sparkles in his ear like the notes of a teasing bell. “You should. Say hello to him for me. Tell him I look forward to our next scene together.”

Axel sighs as she hangs up. Then he jumps what feels like a solid meter into the air as he hears a familiar chuckle. It’s coming from somewhere way, way too close behind him.

He turns slowly. His guts are doing a vigorous bit of cha-cha-cha-ing.

Maxence looks like the cat in the cream—or the cat in the yogurt. He grins at Axel.

“On the table, then, hm?” he says.

~

Autumn is just beginning to show herself in the air that nips at Axel’s fingers, cheeks, and nose.

“No, I mean—it’s just _confusing_. Like, I feel like I forget who I am.” He looks at his hands, picking at the hem of his hoodie, willing himself not to turn red. He’s not sure it’s working. “Who you are. It’s weird. And _you_ sit there looking all—I don’t know.”

Maxence has been quiet all this while, crumby hands hidden in the pockets of his leather jacket, stooping a little as he tends to do when he’s talking with Axel. It should be a little patronizing, maybe, but it’s mainly charming as fuck. His eyes, twin blue lasers, are fixed on Axel’s, or would be, if Axel could stand to return the look.

Helplessly, he stammers on, “It’s just really fucking weird, man.” Maxence is still silent; their feet slap gently against the pavement. Maybe a sinkhole will spontaneously open under him. Maybe a couch will be jettisoned from a window above. He musters a sidelong glance but is foiled by the dusk, settling now into night. In the dimness, he can only see the outline of Maxence’s profile. The profile looks thoughtful.

“A—anyway.” He scrapes his upper lip with his lower incisors, savagely. “Sorry. I don’t—”

“Okay, well, if that’s the problem, what if we just did it?”

“Did—did what?”

“Fucked.” Maxence _giggles_. They’re now under a streetlamp, and Maxence puts a hand on Axel’s shoulder like it’s nothing, like his fingers don’t shoot electricity through three layers of fabric and directly into Axel’s bones. Axel blinks upward, pinned by the shock, and because he can’t think to do anything else. Maxence’s LED-haloed face is heavenly; his chortling is profane.  “Slept together. _Made love_.”

Axel feels his eyeballs bulging from his cranium. Dizzily, he looks around; the coast is clear. He tries to swallow. “Well, that—that seems problematic? Doesn’t it?”

“I thought we already checked to make sure that we’re not cousins. Remember, that one party at Marilyn’s—”

“No, I mean—”

“I think it’d sure as hell beat having to do another twenty takes on the next make-out scene.”

“That was the last make-out scene, you ass,” Axel replies, suddenly angry. “Next we have to pretend to fuck.”

“So won’t it be just that much easier, not to mention better—” Maxence chucks Axel under the chin “—if we went ahead and did it for real?”

He squeezes his eyes shut, not sure if it is fury or lust that darts red and wild through him. “Stop it.” Maxence’s hand slides gently to cup his chin. It would be easy, very easy, to lean into it. “Maxence.”

Then he remembers what Maxence has said about their chemistry, in interviews, in murmured laughing conversation with Lula and Assa and Marilyn: _of course, it’s easy; all you have to do is spend every second together. After that, the chemistry, well, it comes naturally._

He jerks away.

“If I kiss you off the set, it’ll be for real,” he snaps. Something aches behind his sternum. “Is that what you want?”

Maxence looks at him with wide eyes.

“No, of course not,” Axel says. “It’s just a fucking job. For you, for both of us. This—this weird—whatever, all of it—will fade when the job is over.”

Maxence doesn’t say anything. He looks as though Axel has struck him, a high hard blow on the cheek. His face flushes up to the roots of his untameable mane. Is he upset? All Axel can think is that he looks so, so beautiful. He’s already softening, relenting, regretting his outburst. His steel will never be Marilyn’s steel.

“Axel—”

“I’ll see you on set,” Axel says, before it’s too late, and flees.

~

He’s able to hold off that night, replaying Maxence looking, for once, absolutely shocked. By morning, though, his resolve has completely eroded. All he can think about is the smooth-silk slide of Maxence’s thigh between his legs as they rolled about in the sheets. _More tongue_ , he thinks; _more everything_. He tries, he really tries, not to put his fist around his dick. Really.

Once he does, he lasts all of seven minutes.

Fine, he thinks. He glares down. _There. Satisfied?_ Maybe it will actually stay put later.

~

By mid-morning he is forced to admit that those seven minutes were far from enough. Maxence comes back to set armed and dangerous. Every slightest motion seems purposeful, and the purpose is to get Axel’s blood pumping directly into his crotch. He looks at Axel through his lashes, bites his lip, chews at his fingers, tilts his hips _just_ so.

Thank God and every other deity, they get to keep their clothes on today. First there’s a couple of scenes with Le Crew; he feels the tension subsiding a little as he slouches in a circle of chairs with them. At lunch, he at first thinks he can manage. Maxence is there, but so are the girls and also the boys, gathered for the foosball scene in the early afternoon. Axel ignores, or smiles blandly at, each of the meaningful glances Marilyn shoots in his direction.

But then Lula reveals the “special treat” she’d been beaming about since morning. Grapes. Beautiful, enormous, perfectly round green grapes. “Organic!” She pops one into her mouth and moans orgasmically, biting into it. “Sweetest things you’ll ever taste!” The others laugh, but make sounds of concurrence as they each sample some of the little fruits.

“Try one!” she crows, pushing the bunch at Maxence. Axel contemplates snatching them away, but it is too late. Maxence has ripped one of the grapes from its stem. Slowly, slowly, he pinches it between thumb and forefinger. Slower still, he raises it to his pouting lips, all the while gazing unswervingly at Axel. Then he dips his lashes low and in the same moment pushes the grape into his mouth.

Axel finds that he has stopped breathing, and sucks in a large gulp of air.

Maxence rises from his seat, the grape gleaming between his teeth. He leans forward; Axel tries very diligently not to notice how his hoodie slips over the graceful knob of a collarbone. The others cackle and _ooh_ extremely unhelpfully as Maxence puts his face, his horribly beautiful face, a forearm’s length from Axel’s. He tips his chin up as he lifts both eyebrows. “Here,” he says. “Try one too, Lucas.”

Now Axel’s breathing _too much_. He sounds like Darth fucking Vader in his own ears. Maxence is smiling like a Sith lord, too, around that _putain_ grape.

Axel wonders if the others—all laughing, damn them-—have noticed the blood that must surely be rising in his cheeks. Marilyn does seem to be looking at him again, but he ignores her; she isn’t stopping Maxence. She isn’t on his team after all. Sparks flitter and flicker behind his eyes as he also stands. But he takes a step back.

“Eliott—” _No, to hell with it, the game has gone on long enough_. He clenches his fingers around the edge of the table. This is _harassment_. “Maxence—”

The laughter starts to fizzle. Maxence swallows the grape. Marilyn is _definitely_ looking at Axel, hard. He keeps ignoring her.

“I have to—” He turns blindly from them and heads for the stairwell. He has to what? Clear his head? Bang it against the wall?

Maxence reaches, actually _reaches_ , for him. He flinches away; long fingers barely brush the back of his hood. “Axel! Axel, wait.”

“Just give me a minute, sorry. Sorry,” he shouts at David, just arriving to marshal his young troops for the afternoon, “I’ll be right back.”

“Hydrate, young man!” David calls cheerfully after him.

~

He dashes up one flight, three, five; then, panting, he throws himself down on the top stair of a landing, putting his slightly sweaty face in his hands. He jerks in alarm at the thumping of running feet, echoing in pursuit, but he’s too tired, way too tired. No fleeing, this time, for this rabbit; time to stand and fight.

Maxence is panting by the time he rounds the corner eight steps below Axel’s perch. He says Axel’s name in a voice hardly above a whisper.

“No,” replies Axel, though there was no question asked. “No, I can’t.” He wishes he sounded less like he were about to cry and more like a defiant hero, but Maxence is lancing him with an unwavering stare, sapping his will. “I—I can’t playact this shit anymore. Okay?” He begins to get up from the step, to descend, to walk past Maxence without turning back. If he envisions it—if he visualizes his goal, like he’s seen people talk about online—then he has a chance of success.

He is brought up short by Maxence taking the stairs two at a time and thrusting a hand against the wall, barring his way. “Wait. Wait.”

“Why?”

“Who said it was playacting?”

“Oh _Christ_ , _shit_ —” He grinds his teeth, because rage is easier than kissing and far easier than talking. “You did!”

“Axel.”

“I just—I don’t wanna fake it,” he says. It’s not what he wanted to say, and now he can’t trust his own fucking mouth, so he just slaps his own hand on the wall, at a safe remove from Maxence’s. “I—” He sounds so pathetic to himself that he smacks his hand down again.

They stand there, breathing hard, not looking at each other, for what feels like a long time. He should go—the whole crew is waiting—but he finds that he can’t bring himself to peel his feet from the stair. Because going, he knows with certainty, going now will be like slamming a door on something. He’s afraid to think too closely about what he’d be shutting out. More importantly, he refuses to be the one to do it.

“What about Marilyn and Michel?” Maxence says suddenly. His lifts his face to meet Axel’s startled stare. His brows are set, dark, low. “What about _them_? Is that fake, too? Is that going to end when all this is over?”

Axel blinks. He finds himself speechless. His anger, so useful, has abandoned him at the moment of his direst need. “No—no, I—”

“You’ve got no faith in my feelings. What’s it matter what I feel later? I feel it _now_.” Maxence takes another step up, coming so close that Axel can feel the heat of his body. It takes a monumental effort to resist shivering.

Maxence’s fingernails are turning pale against the dark blue of the wall. Axel feels himself rapidly wilting in the waves of Maxence’s warmth.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean—”

“What _did_ you mean?”

Maxence takes Axel’s face in his hands. His thumbs stroke Axel’s cheeks, tracing the bones beneath. As gentle as his fingers are—as sweet as his touch is—his eyes are _feral_. The desperation in his gaze is a fist in Axel’s gut.

“What did you mean?” Maxence repeats. His voice is strained.

Axel’s isn’t in any better shape; he sounds like he’s gargling rocks as he answers, “I thought—I didn’t think you were serious.”

Maxence sucks in a breath through his immaculate teeth. “Shit, Axel—”

“I mean, you’re serious about your work, of course,” Axel says quickly. “I thought that’s what it—this—was to you. Work.”

“You think this is what I do with everyone I work with?”

“ _Putain_ , Maxence, _look_ at yourself! Look at how every single goddamn person around you looks at you! You can’t even help it!”

As soon as the words leave his mouth, echoing hard against the empty walls of the stairwell, he regrets them.

Maxence looks _furious_. Axel had not known that human eyebrows were capable of inclining at that kind of angle. “In case you didn’t fucking notice, I only kiss _you_!”

His lips move, wordless, and then he forces it out, his voice jumping like a fourteen-year-old’s, “It’s in the script!”  

“I—” Maxence chokes. He grabs Axel by the ears. “ _This_ isn’t in the script,” he hisses, “you little—” And then their mouths are colliding with such force that Axel thinks he tastes blood.

Eliott’s kisses have, as a rule, begun softly, coaxingly: slowly, then all at once.

 _This_ kiss is nothing like what Axel has experienced before. Maxence flattens him against the wall. There’s more tongue, yes, fingers tighter in his hair, and teeth, also. Axel lets out a sharp, shocked moan as Maxence bites his lip. “Or is it?” He barely recognizes Maxence’s voice.

“Max— _ah_ —”

Maxence’s hands slide down his ribs and then up again, this time under his shirt, burning hot. It’s Axel’s turn to choke. He tries to say something, something reasonable, something professional, and instead out comes the single most pornographic noise he has ever made. It echoes down the stairwell. In vain, he tries to find some purchase with his hands, squashed between his ass and the wall, some leverage, some strength to resist. His body feels like it’s dissolving, molding to Maxence’s form, permanently melding with the body taut against his.

When his treacherous mouth opens again, it says “Yes—yes.”

For a moment, Maxence looks almost dazed with happiness. _What a fucking sweetheart,_ Axel thinks. _An angel, a god, a national treasure._

He reaches for Maxence and Maxence, grinning, presses into his arms.

He’s sweating, his lungs seem to have shriveled by seventy-five percent, and he can’t bear to open his eyes for fear of completely losing his mind, but still he feels a strange calm, a profound quiet spreading outward from somewhere around his navel in silver ripples. A sense—which makes no sense—of rightness. He understands for a moment what people mean by wanting time to stop. But then there’s some noise, a clank, traveling up to them from far below, and he feels anxiety begin to percolate through him.

“We—they’re—” he croaks around Maxence’s insistent tongue.

“Shh.” Maxence kisses him again, on the lips, and then nuzzles Axel’s head to the left so he can nip at the pulse that thumps hard in Axel’s throat. Axel shudders against him, eyes closing. “Axel, _shit_ —”

“Max—someone’s coming—”

With a groan, Maxence drags himself free of Axel as the unmistakable footfalls near. Axel can barely focus his eyes. His lips feel swollen to twice their usual size.

It’s Marilyn, pretty dark head swiveling left and right as she hunts for them on the stairs; she sees them immediately as she turns the last corner.

“Oh!” She’s startled, hands flying to her mouth, but recovers quickly enough. So much for pretending to have been merely talking. She coughs. “Rehearsing?”

Maxence keeps Axel pinned with his gaze. “No,” he says, low. “That was just for me.”

Axel gulps. There’s a pause as Marilyn looks between them. Slowly, her mouth wavers into a smile.

“Oh, yes?” she says. “I’ll say you need another five, then. Carry on.”

They hear her footsteps tapping lightly off. It almost sounds like she’s skipping.

“Fuck me,” Axel says, sagging against the wall.

Maxence snorts. “Later, gladly, if you’ll permit.”

He’s grinning, but as Axel meets his eyes, the grin fades. Maxence brushes the hair from Axel’s forehead, smoothing it back to one side.

“I mean it,” Maxence says. “I—I’m serious. About you, about all of this.”

Axel is already leaning in.

“You heard the lady,” he murmurs, nose to nose. Maxence sighs, then smiles against his lips. “Carry on.”

~

The rest of the afternoon of shooting passes at times with sickening slowness, and at other times as a flash. They take a short dinner break as evening comes: sandwiches, cold and a little clammy, but Axel gobbles two, peculiarly voracious.

The riverside scene is like actual medieval torture. Not because the night air isn’t pleasantly crisp, or because he’s tired, which he otherwise would be on such a long day as this. No, it’s because he has to spend ninety minutes repeatedly walking shoulder-to-shoulder with the _angel_ he got to snog just a few hours ago in the _fucking_ stairwell on set, and every time he so much as parts his lips he can _taste_ Maxence, hear his aching little groan when they finally had to part and go back down to the others, and smell the light, tantalizing fragrance of that warm perfect neck.

Meanwhile, Maxence seems to have not a whit of trouble breathing, remembering lines, or forming coherent words with his lips and tongue, looking generally Totally Normal and even a little more chilled out than usual.

He seriously contemplates giving himself a minor injury or pretending virulent gastric malaise so that he can at least sprint home and rub one out in peace. But the final “cut” comes at last, and Axel’s heart trampolines into his throat as he looks at Maxence, only to find Maxence already looking at him. More accurately, boring holes into him with those perilous eyes.

“Nice work,” says Maxence. More quietly—so quietly that none of the crew, disassembling and packing away equipment, can overhear, he adds, “Those stripes look cute on you.”

Axel, already warm in the face, feels blood surge toward his buzzing ears and dizzy head and plunge dangerously downward, simultaneously. “My place? Yours?”

“Yours,” Maxence murmurs. “Not as many stairs to climb.” With his back turned to the chattering crew, he smiles, then licks his teeth, wolfishly. It’s a reminder. _Ouba_.

“Oh, uh, maybe yours. No, definitely yours.” At Maxence’s raised eyebrow, he continues. “I can’t—not in front of my _baby_.”

Maxence claps a hand over his mouth to muffle his laugh.

“So the time has come, has it,” he says, still quivering with mirth, “to teach Brian about the birds and the bees.”

Axel snickers, then swallows at the look that Maxence is giving him. It doesn’t do much to wet his suddenly dust-dry tongue, so he tries a couple more times. “I—I just have to give her some dinner first. Um. You can come too.”

“Coming,” Maxence smirks, “is something I have every intention of doing.”

~

It’s stupid, but now that there’s no misunderstanding or tension or whatever hovering over them, Axel feels hideously shy as he watches Maxence pull his T-shirt overhead.

“Are you just going to watch?” Maxence drops to his hands and knees on the bed, winking. “Is that the game plan?” He tilts toward Axel, lips tenderly parted, but delivers a hard kiss that sears, like he’s trying to brand Axel’s mouth with his. He slips two fingers under the neck of Axel’s T-shirt, gives it and the hoodie that Axel still has on over it a tug. “At least take all this off.”

They rustle about in silence for a few minutes. Then he finds himself panting as Maxence helps him shuck off his jeans. “Wait—hold on.”

Maxence stops immediately, laying his palms flat against the muscles just above Axel’s hipbone. “What’s wrong?” He stoops, bumps their noses gently together; a clear blue eye searches Axel’s. “Too fast?”

“Fuck, no,” Axel, in a rush to comfort, puts both hands over Maxence’s and clasps Maxence’s wrists. “No, just—what—” He shakes his head, as though this will loosen the words within. “What exactly are we, uh, doing?” He braces for a laugh. Indeed it comes, but softly, and with not a little surprise.

“Well, I figured—whatever we want?”

 _I want everything_ , Axel thinks. “Yeah—of course,” his mouth says. And then, cautiously, “What do _you_ —”

Maxence grins like the devil himself. “How about I show you?”

~

 _There is no fucking way, no_ fucking _way_ , he thinks, his hands pressing into Maxence’s hair, his fingernails biting a little into the warm skin of Maxence’s scalp, trying to slam the brakes, push eject, break the glass, anything so that he doesn’t come in the third minute of this, his very first blowjob by a celestial being. _There is no fucking way Maxence has never done this before_. He clings to the thought; the little sparks of jealousy it provokes are helping him resist the orgasm that drags at him inexorably, like gravity.

It helps a little to shut his eyes and try to forget who it is that is doing all this to him. But only a little. The fist against his belly squeezes him in rhythm with the tongue lovingly laving his cock and lapping at its slit. He squeaks and flinches as fingers close around his balls and massage them with teasing little tugs and flicks.

The tongue and lips begin to descend still further and he squirms. “Maxence, where are you—Maxence, fuck!” It’s not that he’s never had a mouth _there_ before. But it hadn’t been _this_ mouth.

Maxence pauses in his loving attention to Axel’s balls to grin wickedly up at him. “Too spicy for you?” he murmurs. Then he resumes with a groan, bending forward, nuzzling at Axel’s dick with his nose, his cheek, with all the urgency of a starving man.

Axel clenches his jaw against the cry building in his throat. Maxence’s mouth is all-enveloping and warm as he licks and sucks, nipping here and there, sliding his lips against Axel’s tenderest parts, across nerve endings he didn’t realize he had. Axel arches, swearing and pulling helplessly at Maxence’s hair.

Maxence lifts his mouth free with a wet pop and a little giggle at the sound.

“What’s that,” he whispers, and Axel’s eyes, rolling back into his skull, seem to precipitate an immediate disintegration of his gray matter at the guttering rawness of Maxence’s voice, “you want to fuck my mouth? Hm?”  

“Oh, God,” Axel says unsteadily, “Maxence, fuck, _please_ , yes—”

“Good,” Maxence says. He settles himself more comfortably between Axel’s legs, smiling sunnily up at him, and then he leans forward and swallows Axel down, deep, stopping only when he can go no further. He taps at Axel’s flanks like he’s playing an étude, sliding his hands up and down the goosebumped flesh, and Axel tightens his hands in Maxence’s hair and starts to thrust in earnest into that mouth, heaven and hell in one luscious envelope of heat and noise and pure Maxence.

Maxence moans encouragingly around him. He gags a bit as Axel bucks faster, and faster still, uncontrollably, a tumbling meteor in flame as it is dragged down to earth, but the noise is only fuel to Axel’s fire.

Maxence looks increasingly remote and celestial, breathing hard through his nose and gulping down a garbled, desperate breath around Axel’s dick whenever he can, his eyes beginning to tear up, to glaze over. The bed is shaking, and at first Axel thinks it’s from the fervor of his own thrashing, but then he hears the little _smack-smack-smack_ of Maxence’s divine fist against his divine belly, frenetic, trembling motions that match, beat for beat, every push of Axel’s cock into his mouth.

“God, _fuck_ ,” Axel gasps. “Maxence, you—I’m gonna—I’m gonna—”

Maxence draws back with moan. “Yeah. _Yes_ ,” he says, eyes fluttering shut, lips parting.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Axel bites out, and comes in hot stripes across the saint’s face before him. He buckles forward, folding himself over Maxence, groaning like a wounded beast, cursing too. As the mad tide begins to ebb, he draws back in horror. The streaks of his cum, like spilled cream, are running together with two thin lines of tears that roll prettily from the outside corners of Maxence’s still-shut eyes.

“Shit, shit, sorry,” he exclaims. He darts his hands forward in a vain attempt to wipe Maxence’s face clean but only succeeds in smearing the mess and spreading it more evenly over those softened lips, the breathtaking cheekbones. _Tissue, tissue, fuck_ , he thinks, looking around in a panic, but there’s nothing within reach.

Maxence endures these ministrations for all of half a second before he grabs Axel’s fingers and drags them into his mouth. His eyes are full-open; they are storm-blue, nearly gray, and their pupils enormous. He seems not to notice a glob of semen teetering ominously on his left eyebrow. He’s still pulling at himself, hard and fast.

As Axel stares, dumbfounded by the sheer obscenity of the vision before him, Maxence lunges up and kisses him, tongue plunging deep into Axel’s mouth, feeding Axel the taste of himself.

They pull apart, panting. Maxence’s smile is not at all saintly.

“Clean me up yourself,” he says, between little groans.

Axel swears in a long unbroken string. He tips Maxence flat on the bed and laps at his face; encouraged by the bucking and throttled cries this produces, he reaches down to wrap his fingers around Maxence’s pumping hand, his trembling cock. Maxence jolts, closing his teeth with a clack around a wail.

“You fucking _slut_ ,” Axel mutters, running his tongue down Maxence’s cheek, across his brow, along his jaw, “you goddamn _angel_ —”

“Axel,” Maxence gasps. He throws his head back, writhing under Axel’s hand. “Axel!”

Axel kisses him, savoring the lingering bitterness of himself on both their tongues. Maxence sobs once beneath him and comes all over his stomach and their interlaced hands.

~

Just yesterday, as they filmed the bed scene, he and Maxence lay face to face and spoke in soft, longing whispers. Here, in Maxence’s slightly cramped actual bed, the sheets kicked to the floor in one grand un-artistic heap and their clothes lumped in another, Maxence’s messy head pillowed on Axel’s chest, Axel’s fingers dancing up and down Maxence’s shoulder, they joke loudly and shout with laughter.

“In another universe, I think we just straight-up fucked in that big storage room on the top floor,” Maxence chortles.

Axel snorts.

“No, we stayed in the stairwell,” he says. “And I sucked your brains out through your dick right then and there while you tried in vain to text Papa David.”

“What, begging him to come save me from your clutches?”

Axel strokes his hair. “No, dummy. To tell him we were going to skip the rest of filming today.”

Maxence’s head jerks up. He raises himself onto one elbow and stares at Axel, scandalized. “Axel,” he exclaims. “You know I would never. I would never.”

Axel laughs. “I know.” He draws Maxence down with a palm cupped around that slightly damp nape and kisses his angel, slowly, deeply. Maxence settles against him with a warm sigh. “You’re serious.”


End file.
